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The Ward: One of Toronto’s more historic, yet forgotten, communities

How should the city excavate and commemorate the heritage of this ghost neighbourhood and its critical role in the shaping of modern Toronto?

By John Lorincspecial to the star

Sun., May 19, 2013

A week from now, thousands of people will fan out across Greater Toronto to take advantage of a once-a-year opportunity to poke inside intriguing buildings that are often closed to the public. As in previous years, the
Doors Open
roster includes architectural gems, cultural or religious institutions, and heritage buildings.

But there will be no doors to open in one of the city’s more historic, and yet most thoroughly forgotten, communities — a once dense Kensington Market-like precinct known as “the Ward,” home to thousands of poor immigrants who arrived here between the 1890s and the 1920s. The area, which today would likely be described as a “priority neighbourhood,” later became Toronto’s first Chinatown. Little remains, although interest in the Ward’s history persists. The question is, how should the present-day city excavate and commemorate the heritage of this ghost neighbourhood and its critical role in the shaping of modern Toronto?

Bounded by Queen, Yonge, University and College, the Ward developed in the mid-19th century and was also known as Macaulaytown. Its commercial spine was Elizabeth Street, a bustling strip of tiny shops serving working-class patrons. By the early 1900s, the merchants hailed from countries like China, Russia and Italy. Many residents also worked in Eaton’s massive factories a few blocks east.

The Ward’s cultural and linguistic diversity was utterly alien to a notoriously anglophile city. Its poverty attracted the attention of missionaries, social crusaders, civic officials and even artists such as the Group of Seven’s Lawren Harris, who often took his easel to the side streets to paint tumbledown worker’s cottages.

Renowned city photographer Arthur Goss also shot hundreds of photos demonstrating both the harsh conditions as well as intriguing slices of daily life, such as a 1907 portrait of an all-black choir from a church on what’s now Bay Street.

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The community, which teemed with children growing up in large, first-generation families, became a kind of test bed for social, housing and public health reforms that later spread to the rest of Toronto and elsewhere in Canada. In the 1910s, the country’s first supervised playground opened in the Ward (Sick Kids now occupies the site), as well as one of Toronto’s earliest immigrant resettlement agencies — a former brothel at 84 Gerrard St. W. that was transformed into Central Neighbourhood House. The Toronto House of Industry, now part of the new YWCA Elm Centre, also provided charity to the poor.

Yet in one of the Toronto’s darker chapters, most of the Ward’s homes and shops were expropriated and bulldozed after the Second World War to make way for what would become Nathan Phillips Square and the expansion of the University Ave. hospitals. Apart from a few 19th-century row houses, there’s virtually nothing in the public realm to show that a poor but vibrant community existed there.

One of the only historical markers, notes local councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, is a decade-old plaque next to City Hall describing the forcible uprooting of the Ward’s Chinese community; before entering politics, Wong-Tam, then head of a Chinese-Canadian business group, led the fundraising efforts to pay for the modest memorial. While the suggestion came from Heritage Toronto, the city didn’t offer any funding. “That was my first introduction to the history of Elizabeth Street.”

In fact, the architecture of poverty tends to be wiped out, not preserved. “Traditionally, what’s been important in history has been about the upper classes,” observes Toronto heritage architect Michael McClelland, citing well-known historic buildings such as Casa Loma. “What we haven’t paid attention to is everybody else.”

Yet he points out that in recent years, there’s been a push to find engaging ways to relate what he calls “everyone’s history,” including the narratives of very poor working-class neighbourhoods once dismissed as “slums” to be razed.

In New York City, for example,
the Tenement Museum
has captured the imaginations of hundreds of thousands of visitors who crowd into the almost perfectly intact apartments of a cramped five-storey walk-up on Orchard Street, in the once infamous Lower East Side.

With more than 200,000 visitors per year, says museum spokesperson Kira Garcia, it is now one of New York’s top 15 tourist attractions, but also draws tens of thousands of schoolchildren who listen to stories about some of the building’s original inhabitants — Irish and Jewish immigrants who toiled in Lower Manhattan’s sweat shops in the 19th century.

The City of Toronto a few years ago floated the concept of creating a museum about the Ward inside City Hall, with digital displays focusing on immigration. But city officials say the project was put on hold because of the 1812 bicentennial, as well as preliminary plans to establish a Toronto Museum at Casa Loma. (The Toronto Archives recently had a temporary exhibit on immigrants and The Ward.)

The Toronto Museum project is nowhere near fruition. And it’s not clear whether the city has plans to create signage, plaques or other public markers offering information about what existed in the Ward, and why it then disappeared.

Wong-Tam says way-finding tools could be simple but effective. “People are fascinated by discovering things they didn’t know about,” adds McClelland. “Anything that enriches the fabric of the city is a potentially good thing.”

Yet time will be the enemy of more ambitious attempts to preserve the area’s remaining built form.

“The development pressures on that block are immense,” observes Jill Taylor, an architect who specializes in heritage conservation districts.

And while there are still Torontonians who either grew up in the Ward or have ancestors who did, those stories will soon pass out of living memory. Recording oral history is a powerful way to preserve the community’s legacy and teach a multicultural history of the city, says McClelland. “It would be very interesting to do a Ward project on the Internet and get it all recorded.”

He notes such initiatives tend to grow and expand over time.

Indeed, when Tenement Museum co-founder Ruth Abram set out to document the history of the Lower East Side, she didn’t immediately have plans to establish a bricks-and-mortar institution.

Raised in a non-observant Jewish family from Georgia, Abram, a social activist involved with the feminist movement, attended college in New York and became intrigued at the notion of telling the story of mass immigration to America.

According to Garcia, the discovery of the building itself was something of a fluke: in the late 1980s, Abram and co-founder Anita Jacobson were looking to rent a storefront space to run historic walking tours of the Lower East Side, and stumbled across one of the few remaining tenements, which had been condemned and mostly shuttered since the 1930s.

With grants and a shoestring budget, they fixed it up just enough to allow visitors to explore the old apartments, which remain in the state they were in the 1930s. They also researched the building’s history, using city records to eventually identify more than 10,000 tenants who lived there between the late 1800s and 1935. (A handful of visitors either lived in the building as children or had relatives who did.)

The tour guides focus on the reconstructed histories of a handful of actual families, but they also include opinionated explanations about racism, harsh working conditions and the emergence of the garment workers’ unions.

Garcia points out that the museum has gone out of its way to appeal to school groups. “In a city like New York, so many of the children in public schools are immigrants or children of immigrants. Their experiences are relevant and really bring the history to life. The message is universal.”

Toronto officials point out that the Scarborough Museum in Thomson Memorial Park has placed a strong emphasis on telling the story of immigration to school-age children, recently securing a $400,000 federal grant to develop its youth programming for other museums. But unlike such facilities, the Tenement Museum is an independent charity with no connection to government and thus no restrictions on how its curators choose to present the material.

Wong-Tam feels the city should be a leader in any historical project about the Ward, but says she’s open to partnerships as well as innovative ideas about how to present the information.

“The language of how we tell these stories is changing and there are new ways to interpret history.” Still, she adds, “People like to stand in time and place and reimagine what the streetscape used to be.”

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